Matthew Zapruder

the air was sweeter
for a good long while

everything had stopped
so many people we know

did not come and sit
near our door and say

how is your garden
your little sunflowers

it is said their heads
turn to watch the sun

but they don’t at all
no birds ever came

to eat the green shoots
my little sunflowers

I watched them poke up
through the soft black dirt

with that undeserved pride
I feel when he writes his name

I did not teach him guitar
like I was my dad

I just put him in the car
and played Guided by Voices

and drove back and forth
through his favorite tunnel

Winter 2021 - Fast

The last poem I will ever write
will be like the first dream I ever

wrote down, when I was green like a lawn
that did not know it was not the world,

I had gone to school and learned to be
a little angry argument machine

and all the dittos slept in the blue
light of filmstrips about the last war,

and we stood in line for the movie
about robots who saved everything

with the help of people that taught them
the essential importance of death

words they did not need to understand
but only speak when they faced the gate,

then I went home and read the stories
about Norse Gods and fell into sleep

with its unrealistic drawings
and never woke up until we met

and this was the dream I remembered:
mother and father were standing there

each wearing the faces of those ones
whose benevolence cannot be changed

by actions or time, they are constant
like a room that hides in an old book

you filled with wildflowers and sunlight.